An Account of the Pelew Islands, Situated in the Western Parts of the Pacific Ocean, Composed from the Journals and Communications of Captain Henry Wilson and some of his officers, who, in August 1783, were there Shipwrecked, in the Antelope.

FIRST EDITION, with engraved portrait frontispiece, 16 engraved plates, charts and maps, 2 folding, errata leaf, contemporary tree calf, gilt coroneted crest of the Earl of Darnley on both covers, red morocco spine label, large 4to [300 x 270mm], London: Printed for G. Nicol, 1788, a fine large choice copy with an extraordinary provenance.

“In 1783 the Antelope, commanded by Captain Henry Wilson, was wrecked on a reef near one of the Palau (Pelew) Islands, a previously unexplored group. The entire crew managed to get safely ashore, where they were well treated by the natives and eventually managed to build a small vessel from the wreck, in which they reached Macao. They took Prince Lee Boo, one of King Abba Thule’s sons, with them to England, where he made a good impression… [but] he soon died of smallpox” (Hill). Keate wrote the account based on the journal and papers of Wilson and other officers.

‘The context was the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War normal routes from China westwards for British shipping were hampered by the Dutch East Indies. The Antelope had been returning from Macau by the “Eastern Passage”, a route designed to avoid the south-west monsoon, but had strayed too far in the easterly direction.

On the north coast of New Guinea Wilson anchored in the vicinity of the Schouten Islands. After some dialogue over two days with Papuan inhabitants who came out to the ship, in which Wilson used vocabulary collected by Thomas Forrest at Dory Harbour, Wilson felt the numbers he faced were threatening. He used small arms to deter them, and the crew of the Antelope was attacked, an encounter in which the artist Arthur William Devis was injured. The wreck on Ulong followed.

Although Spain had claimed the islands previously, Wilson’s crew made the first sustained contact, which was friendly. One of the crew of the Antelope knew Malay, allowing contact to be made with the ibedul on Koror, whom Wilson treated as a local king, somewhat misapprehending his status which was more like an elected official. While his men spent three months rebuilding the ship, Wilson entered an effective alliance with the ibedul in conflicts with Melekeok and others. One of the Antelope’s guns proved decisive, shipped in a boat and discharged with powder alone’. DNB

Provenance: “Capt. Barkley/Navy”, contemporary inscription on verso of the frontispiece. This is most probably Captain Charles William Barkley (1759-1832) who, from 1786 to 1788 sailed the Indian Ocean in the Princess Frederica, then in the Halcyon to Kamchatka and Alaska, Hawaiian Islands and Cochin China before being captured by the French at Mauritius. Barkley’s wife Frances (who was one of the first women to circumnavigate the globe) recorded in her journal that in May 1792 the Barkleys had landed at the New Carolina Islands in the Celebes, commenting that “they answer the description given by Captain Wilson of the Pelew Islands and the words given in his vocabulary of those Islands” (The Remarkable World of Frances Barkley, 1769-1845, 2003, edited by Beth Hill and Cathy Converse).

Library of the Earl of Darnley with his gilt crest on both covers.

Cox II, 302; Hill 907